"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010

I won't be fair to fascists. I won’t be nice to Nazis. I will not give them a fair hearing. They've had their hearing and on their own terms. We've had their message aired universally, enthusiastically supported by conservatives here and abroad, and we have abundant examples of what happens when they achieve power. The combination constitutes probably the most ill-advised test of time given in recent history. And they've failed the viability test. We know the catalog of their crimes and we know that those crimes are the only part of their platform that they deliver on. They promise to kill people, to enslave people, to exclude people and to plunder the property of their victims. And that they can do. That is they can until either their own population or another has had enough and overthrows them. Victory, a higher standard of living, what they promise their supporters will be bought with that blood? No. They're not so good on that despite the lying Luce line*.

Why anyone who pretends to be a liberal spends a second of their lives, though they live to be a hundred, being nice to them or defending their rights is one of the more idiotic results of the Code of Liberal Ethics. They've had their rights, as noted above. And their victims have had the full benefit of their exercise of those "rights". Why these liberal niceness scolds spend a second on the rights of fascists that they could spend on the rights of the victims of fascists is an exercise in ego of the worst kind. I will get to that in a minute after pointing out that I have made no guarantee of being such a nice person. No fascist should ever live in the expectation that they are going to see a benevolent smile from me. No liberal or leftist should expect me to be patient with the insistence that we be fair to them. As if the fascists were all going to attend a Developments in Contemporary Fascism seminar which will make living with them possible. Socialism develops, fascism has already found their true religion, racism, violence, slavery, theft and war.

If this apostasy isn't bad enough, it gets worse. I am an NMAS free speech absolutist. That, after Lorainne Hansberry, means No More After Skokie. There is no reason for anyone on the left to come to the defense of the free speech rights of fascists.

Given their stated intentions and their history it is bizarre that any leftist would entertain considering the free speech rights of fascists. Why should any leftist give them the time of day nevermind a fully paid legal representation? The old reason given by the most easily stomached of our fairness monitors is that, "if they are silenced then we can be too". This argument has the virtue of replacing absolutist prissiness with an appeal to practicality. But it is empty. They haven't been silenced, they are all over the place. Ann Coulter's insane performance art is certainly not silent. And she's only one of the slew of dispund that fills the airwaves and makes it into print. We, dear friends, are entirely frozen out. Effectively blacklisted. The real left appears only slightly less often than plate spinners on our media. There is the pantomime of liberalism presented but it is such a transparent farce that even dismissing it gives it more attention than it deserves. Free speech sermons by liberal scolds is one of the more popular scenes of the farce.

As our friends in Canada sometimes point out, free speech is a right, it isn't the only right. Rights exist in tension, they don't exist outside of people and their owners don't exist in a vacuum. All rights may be absolute until they impinge on the rights of someone else. It is when they do impinge on other peoples' rights that things become less absolute than lends itself to facile philosophical contemplation between commercial pods and the length of a Village Voice column.

Let's take a variation on a classic. There is no right for a person to stand in the road outside your house and yell abuse at you for extended periods of time. Especially not at night. I doubt that someone could get away with standing outside your house and yelling adoration at you for several hours in the afternoon. It wouldn't be surprising if long and loud proclamations of affection met with a quicker and more forceful response by the police after your terrified call for help fifteen minutes into the incident. I have never heard a free speech absolutist defend this kind of speech and risk their own domestic tranquility. Why should a random night of sleep enjoy more protection than the one and only opportunity of an entire family to exercise the right granted by common decency, to hold a funeral free of the publicity stunts of hate cults? If a family can't bury their dead without the likes of the Phelps tribe turning their grief into a media availability, I don't want to be a part of your "free speech".

Free speech absolutists believe that they are acting out of high principle, I fervently want to believe it of some of them**. There are free speech absolutists who I not only respect but love. But when you make free speech into an overriding absolute, an inflexible absolute, the principle becomes a petty scruple. It becomes moral schtick which includes the absolutist's imagined right, by virtue of their constitutional purity, to dispose of other peoples' rights without their consent and often in the face of their vigorous disapproval. The worst of them appropriate as the raw material of their media careers as "defenders of the constitution" the lives and rights of the victims of fascists, both past and future. Who the hell died and made them God?

Note: I read this through and, with a few amendments and edits, it's still a pretty good summary of my attitude toward Nazism, fascism and the idiot liberals who worry about their right to advocate destroying the rights and lives of people other than said idiot liberals. At least till they get round to them. I would, today, include Marxists and other pseudo-left fascists in that list. I believe much of the original pose of "First Amendment Absolutism" was invented by Marxists and their sympathizers as the pudding headed attempt to prevent their incompetent and stupid propaganda being suppressed under equal protection and other such legal arguments. In the process the dopes enabled corporate fascists who had proved beyond any doubt that they were quite able to suppress dissent that risked harming the oligarachs' profits while permitting fascist and Nazi propaganda to flourish. It's Steve Bannon who is elevated to a position of power, not some careful, diligent and honest writer for The Nation or Mother Jones.

* The claim of fascist efficiency, capsulized in the claim that Mussolini was the man who made the trains run on time. Which was a lie. It arose, especially, due to the efforts of Mussolini's biggest fan in the United States, the founder of Time and Life magazines, Henry Luce who was a huge propagandist for fascism including Mussolini's genocidal invasion of Ethiopia. Only that's all smoothed over in the popular culture of the United States.

** That was ten years ago, I no longer believe that they care about preventing fascism or saving democracy, I believe it is everything from a false front, with Nat Hentoff's emigration to fascist think tanks and Joel Gora and the ACLU's continuing enablement of fascism even as it takes hold to being merely a conventional and superficial pose of the merely conventional social liberal. Among professional writers and those who work in the media, I see it as their protection of a privilege of their profession which they care about more than the necessity of The People knowing the truth as opposed to believing lies funneled into their ear by the megaphone of the corporate media. Their profession flourishes under the present regime under which telling the truth is prevented or forbidden to have political effect while telling lies and spreading them will get you a fat salary. As I recently pointed out, even some of the more sincere and intelligent members of the scribbling class have fallen for that ahistorical nonsense.

If you read the comments, you will note that I am having a brawl with one of Simp's friends from Eschaton, a "Skeptic Tank," over his contention that it's all those Christians fault that the white Methodist woman didn't win the election - though she won a majority of the vote.

While I wouldn't necessarily trust their numbers, because I simply don't trust that kind of methodology to discern actual reality, he wants to argue on the basis the Pew research preliminary report on what percentage of people who profess what religious orientation voted for who. I started at a different place than he wanted to, I started my argument with their characterization of what the religious composition of the electorate was.

If you take those numbers seriously, which I will only for the sake of argument, the non-Christian percentage of the voting population is 3+8+15% or just over a quarter of the electorate. But it is certain that not all of those non-Christians voted for Hillary Clinton, many voted for Trump and some for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or someone else. As you can see in this chart in the report cited by my opponent.

From just under to more than a quarter of each non-Christian group voted for Trump, so there is no way that a significant majority of those who voted for Hillary Clinton were not Christians. A significant number of those would be classified as White Christians, though in these charts, the only such breakdown is for Catholics.

I will note here that the large difference Pew chose to show between White and "Hispanic" Catholics would seem, to me, to indicate that their choice to concentrate on the religion of the voters as paramount is, actually, obscuring other, more salient determinants of who voted for whom. Latino Catholics and "White Catholics" all share the same church, the same doctrines, dogmas, liturgy and sacraments, to an extent which I strongly suspect would surprise those whose concept of the Catholic church is based on false stereotypes and left over Protestant invective. Though that invective is mostly spread by atheists these days, in my experience. I will point out that they also share the same Pope and that the current and very popular pope is a Latino man of Italian heritage. I would question the term "Hispanic" which hardly describes the Latino population in the Catholic church which includes many Spanish speakers of African, Native and European origin. There are a significant number of American Catholics who are of African and other origin who would seem to have been left out by Pew. If they'd made a similar division among Protestants I'm sure there would have been problems with that worth bringing up.

Just on that basis, if you are taking Pew as your authority, there is no way that, if you wanted to give the "Hillary Clinton vote" some character based on the religious profession of those who voted for her, it could be anything but majority Christian. I could point out that the graph I posted yesterday assigned characteristics to churches as "mainline" or "evangelical" I was curious to note that Hillary Clinton's Methodist Church was designated "mainline" while it certainly began and, I would say, still retains the features that define a church as "evangelical". Perhaps that designation is less meaningful than its current use in the media and in sociological fudging of reality would lead us to believe. I'll point out again that, contrary to atheist categorization, not even the most conservative denomination is uniform in character.

I would call your attention to the graph I posted yesterday which breaks down the supposed political preference by different religious denominations and groups. Most of the people who look at that would concentrate their attention on whether or not the bars indicate more Republicans than Democrats in any particular denomination but I will ask you to think more liberally and notice that even within the most "Republican" of denominations, there are significant percentages of those who vote for Democrats. Even the most conservative of denominations contain thousands, tens, even hundreds of thousands of those who vote for Democrats or who expressed no particular preference. If you want a practical plan to win elections instead of fostering anti-liberal -fascistic, really- atheist pipe dreams, increasing those percentages would make entirely more sense. Of course, any attempt by Democrats to do that could not violate our core values of equality, of people owning and controlling their own bodies, of personal dignity and the rights to more than mere and miserable subsistence.

The guy who I am brawling with seems to believe, somehow, that everything would be all better if some significant part of the American population just disappeared. As I pointed out, that's exactly Trumps prescription for so much of what ails us, only he unfashionably proposes to get rid of Muslims, while the atheist sci-guy wants to get rid of some or a very large percentage of Christians, designating "evangelicals" for elimination. Well, getting rid of large numbers of people based on religious identity is a common feature of dictators, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Callas, Hoxha... I do find it rather bizarre to find such a desideratum expressed by an alleged liberal and retain their status as a reputable member of alleged liberalism. Only atheists have long gotten away with that, one of the tools which Republicans have used to bash liberals with.

Since he claimed that religion turns people "conservative" I will note that if someone followed the teachings of Jesus and the economic features of the Mosaic Law which so much of his gospel is based in, they would not only be a liberal by today's standards, they would be far more radically liberal than any conventional political-economic ideology of secularism can imagine. I'm sure the atheist would denominate the Catholic church as far right, evil and oppressive when even the recent conservative Popes' economic encyclicals are radical by comparison to any Democratic platform I've ever bothered to look at. The current Pope's environmental encyclical is attacked regularly in the right-wing media. If liberalism is going to be revived and govern there is everything to work with in Christian teaching and it has a record of getting people elected. His kind of atheist snobbery, ridicule, dishonest invective and class derision is a proven loser in half a century of testing. Dump it, not Christianity.

Friday, November 18, 2016

I may or may not post the further spewing of Simps, he's like a lexicon of conventional pseudo-liberal conventional wisdom which is wrong. Depends on whether or not I want to bother to refute the obviously false anymore today. I'm wrote out for now. Update

1. I know you're not especially good at reading but I never said that anyone had a legitimate reason to vote for Trump or Hitler, never have said anything like that and never would. So you're lying, and the sun is due to set this afternoon and water is wet...

2. You know, your having to lie about what I said would lead a reasonable person to conclude you don't have and never have had any refutation of what was said.

3. As Bertrand Russell diagnoses your condition: "A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand." You prove you're such a stupid man in every encounter we have, you're only reconfirming that which has already been confirmed. Shouldn't you be talking about fifty-year-old pop music, the terrible injustice when old people in show biz die of old age type stuff and what you're having for supper when no one in the world cares?

Update: Now Simps is calling me a "Nazi enabler". Yawn! Here is a reposting of one of my first pieces, which I've repeated several times I Won't Be Fair To Fascists I Won't Be Nice To Nazis, in which I call for liberals to stop supporting and worrying about the alleged rights of Nazis and fascists. I don't recall if Simps was one of the many people who slammed me for that, worrying that it was a violation of the poor, put upon Nazi's civil liberties... to which I say nuts, let the Nazis worry about their civil liberties, it will keep them busy instead of finding ways to obliterate other peoples' civil liberties and lives. It was, by the way, largely blue-collar class white guys who I'm sure the Baby Blue class white collar guys would slam as "trash" who defeated the Nazis. My father would probably fall into that category with them.

Christians pretty much elect all presidents in the United States, white Christians are certainly an indispensable part of the Democratic coalition that elect pretty much all Democrats who win elections.

You're alleged to have something to do with science, do you contend that white Christians aren't part of the majority of the vote which A WHITE METHODIST WOMAN WON LAST WEEK?

My most obsessive troll is screaming at the top of his fingers that he and his classmates at the private, mid-range C. W. Post College he is a graduate of are not responsible for electing Donald Trump. That he didn't go to an Ivy League School and, besides, he's Jewish. I'll post the comments to illustrate after I've posted this. I will note, because he'll lie about it, I didn't bring religion into the discussion, I concentrated on class issues.

The desire among the geezers of the blogging class to pin the blame for Trump on white Christians who didn't go to college and who have blue collar jobs and especially those who have a Southern or Mid-Western accent is a perfect example of the kind of clueless kicking down that those cowards love to engage in, safe in their middle to upper class environs, safe in their white skins, safe in the milieu of insulation that they liberalize from as they preen in their superiority to those benighted hoards.

That kind of stuff is an artifact of the folly of believing all such questions such as "who do we blame Trump on" can be discerned scientifically, with the methods of that most typical of college-educated superstition, Sociology, surveying, polling, blah, blah, blah. But the question is even stupider than trying to figure out which day, which hour, which minute, which second the cancer went from being curable to being fatal. The reasons and motives and, even more so, the identity of who it was who cast the deciding votes that handed the election to an outright fascist are hardly likely to fall neatly into sociological categories, selected for the convenience of the surveyor's tabulation and analysis and likely by the outcome they want. And there is no guarantee of how accurate one or all of the answers they got is, just to start with the pretense of the exercise.

Since you and your tag team buddy would seem to want to put the blame on those Christians you hate so much...

I think what we really learn from the exercise of assigning blame tells us everything about the minds and motives of those who assign blame and little to nothing about who actually deserves blame. There were and no doubt still are Evangelicals for Hillary , there were even anti-abortion Evangelicals who were for Hillary much to the anger of other Evangelicals. The Democratic coalition has always included and absolutely depended on large numbers of Black and Latino church goers as well as White ones. If you insist on sociology here, from the high church of that stuff Pew.

At the other end of the spectrum, an overwhelming majority of members of the AME Church (92%) identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, while just 4% say they favor the Republican Party (an 88-point gap). Similarly, 87% of members of the National Baptist Convention and 75% of members of the Church of God in Christ (another historically black denomination) identify as Democrats.

,,, Catholics are divided politically in our survey, just as they were in the 2012 election. While 37% say they favor the GOP, 44% identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party (and 19% say they do not lean either way). In the 2012 election, 50% of Catholics said they voted for Obama, while 48% voted for Romney.Members of mainline Protestant churches look similar to Catholics in this regard. For example, 44% of members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) identify as or lean Republican in the survey, compared with 47% who are Democrats or Democratic-leaning. United Methodists and Anglicans are slightly more likely than other mainline groups to say they are Republicans, while members of the United Church of Christ are more likely to be Democrats.

And even among the groups that mostly go for Republicans, there are likely to be highly significant percentages of them which vote for Democrats.

Adding up the Democrats in just those churches which are largely identified with Republicans, by sheer numbers, I would bet there are more Democratic voters among them than there are non-Christians or professed atheists, a group which apparently even that source of so much recent atheist propaganda choose not to include in this chart. How Agnostics escaped from the "Nones" umbrella would be interesting to know but no more than why Pew, an allegedly honest group, uses that ideological fiction. It could also be pointed out that there are identifiable groups within those cruder labels who voted against the type, I was shocked to find out that Orthodox in Brooklyn went heavily for Trump, perhaps it was due to his daughter's conversion when she married that Kushner creep.

What I learn from snobs like you who want to pin responsibility for Donald Trump on the poeple in the underclass he conned instead of the media who were in on the con job with Trump is exactly what I said, you are conceited snobs who like to believe you're a lot smarter than your political history proves you to be and who have a deep and abiding hatred of poor people unless you can romanticize and sentimentalize them on the basis of their not being white. If people like you hadn't started that crap safe in their white collar enclaves fifty to sixty years ago, the white underclass would be a lot harder marks for the Trumps and Republicanfascists. You guys had a lot more to do with elevating Trump, especially those in your alleged profession of journalism than some poor white people who live in a trailer, who can't get their kids educated, who have a work life similar to that of the fictitious Ennis Del Mar and who will get shafted by Trump just as they have in the past. You're hardly the only ones to blame but you're right up there. And if you don't like me targeting your colleagues in journalism, many of whom opposed Trump, I was only applying your rules to you.

I know this is too much mathematical thinking for you, even though I didn't go through the numbers, it apparently is for your, um, "scientific" buddy, as well.

Update 3: Oh, I was wrong, they did include Atheists in the chart. I should have blown it up more. Compare the number of Atheists who voted Republican with the AME church and The National Baptist Conventions. Just for the fun of confounding the atheist "Xian" bashers.

I suspect that, unlike most of the people who throw around the term "trailer trash" and who use that form of housing as a term of disparagement, I've known a lot of people who lived in trailers. Most of them are quite decent people who have that most unforgivable of conditions even among the allegedly liberal, being poor*.

Having gone to college, knowing lots of college faculty, having spent time among the Ivy League class of people, I also have had a chance to see the clean, well coiffed and manicured wealthy up close and in their element and. as well, the academic and intellectual class. I will say that they've got nothing on the people who live in trailers by way of trashy behavior. If anything, more of the people I've known who live in trailers have higher morals than the wealthy and well-educated, a number of them have more sense, as well.

I can't talk about this without again bringing up the main character in Brokeback Mountain, Ennis Del Mar and that Annie Proulx not only put him, that most sympathetic of tragic figures among the liberal elite, in a trailer, And the admirable Ms. Proulx, not only put him in a dilapidated trailer, she made him what would be considered "trailer trash" from the start, having him urinate in the sink. I doubt anyone I know who lives in a trailer does that, though almost every man I've known who lives in a trailer has a wife who wouldn't put up with that.

But urinating in a sink, if it's your sink and no one else uses it, is a crime against your own sanitation, it isn't rank amorality and moral depravity of the kind our elites envelop the world in. Reading about how Charles Kushner, Ivanka Trumps father in law father got back at his own sister and brother-in-law for turning states witness against him.

Now he has stepped down as chairman of his company. His days as a political force both nationally and in New Jersey are over. Saddest of all, he has shattered his once close-knit family. The days when the Kushner clan—Charles and his three siblings and all their spouses and kids and grandkids—would travel to Miami together for Passover are long gone. He and his older brother, Murray, have not spoken in more than two years as a result of a bitter lawsuit over money Murray believed Charles owed him from deals they had done together—a lawsuit that Charles Kushner’s supporters claim opened the door for the U.S. Attorney’s investigation into his campaign-finance activities.And, of course, to add to the horror, the federal witnesses he had attempted to retaliate against were his sister and brother-in-law, who were cooperating with that same investigation. Kushner paid a prostitute $10,000 to lure his brother-in-law to a motel room at the Red Bull Inn in Bridgewater to have sex with him. A hidden camera recorded the activity, and Kushner sent the lurid tape to his sister, making sure the tape arrived on the day of a family party.As he sat in his office less than 24 hours after his guilty plea, the phone rang. The caller couldn’t have been more unexpected—it was Governor Jim McGreevey. Though Kushner had given the governor more than $1.5 million for his two races and was instrumental in his rise to power, the two had barely spoken in months.

I don't know anyone who lives in a trailer who has ever done anything worse than these guys and their tale of trashiness could be met with equally trashy stories from the millionaire and billionaire class thousands of times. You wonder why liberals don't put the blame for the creation and election of Trump where it really belongs, with this class of trash. Could it be because their alleged liberalism is a manifestation of upper class snobbery far more than any real devotion to economic justice? Could it be because it's far less risky to kick down than up? Or could it be that they're really just not liberal?

The rich class, beyond any doubt, contains a far, far higher percentage of people who engage in the trashiest of behavior than the poorer class, yet it's poor people who are blanketed with the behavior of the worst of them. Rich people hire lawyers and lobbyists and buy politicians and judges to make their trashiest behavior legal and allowed, they get praise for it in the well paid media, staffed by rich people - look at Trump. A real difference in what gets called "liberal" and what gets called "conservative" in the United States, Britain and elsewhere is in which poor people are the objects of their scorn and hatred. Conservatives in the United States focus theirs on Black People, Latinos, and others while treating poor whites as stupid people who can be manipulated into a resource, acting as their tools. Alleged liberals, those people who are always congratulating themselves on their brilliance, aid them by heaping scorn and derision on poor white people while sentimentalizing the poverty of Black People and Latinos. The liberal supported American media has been part of the right-wing's gaming of the stupidity and hypocrisy of alleged liberals to their political and, so, financial advantage. In this, the biggest dopes of all have been liberals of the type who have not learned a single thing in the past half-century of what happens when they play along with this.

As I said, to the fury of several people, after watching them for more than half a century, secular liberals are about the stupidest political identity, the kind who can go on with a rotten and stupidly self-defeating habit as it fails and fails again and again. They really are stupider than the Sneetches in Dr. Suess's story. They learned from getting cheated through their own stupidity. I see little sign that many liberals have or will.

I put any hope for liberalism learning and not acting so stupidly on those who put egalitarian democracy and justice before their own preening self-congratulation. The kind of people who wouldn't think in terms like "trailer trash" or find it fun to say it because they know it is wrong and the don't want to hurt people.

* I used to wonder what the difference between living in a trailer was and living in one of the "tiny houses" that may still be a fad among such wealthy people. I suspect the difference is in the price per square foot. When I first started reading about the "tiny house movement" my first thought was of small houses that would be good for poor people to live in, then I saw the bijoux boxes that, somehow, seem to get bigger and bigger in the "tiny house movement" little custom made mansions that have more to do with Thomas Jefferson's useless garden folly than with Thoreau's cabin or the Mad Houser's outlaw huts for the destitute. I can't think of anything more trashy than some of the Faberge class tiny houses I've seen. They turn my stomach in a way that reading about Ennis Del Mar pissing in his sink doesn't.

My friend Duke from West Virginia said something that had crossed my mind but had shoved aside as bitterness: "Fuck the white working class. Obama gave them health insurance and a chance to get new jobs and they hated him. Fuck them." Without thinking, I immediately agreed, and as soon as I did, it made total sense. "You're right. Democrats need to abandon the white working class." By "abandon," I mean not trying to desperately court the votes of people who always vote against their best interests and against those who are trying to help them. See, Democrats don't have a working class white people problem. Working class white people have the problem. When you vote against those who are trying to help you for the very people who have harmed you, then you are not dealing with rational thought.Yeah, that's patronizing and elitist. But nearly half of the voters in a presidential election chose the man who regularly lied to them. So you'll have to forget it if you want me to romanticize and normalize their ignorance.By the way, that ignorance is a product of years of Republican fuckery at the local level to assure them that they do not get educated. That long game has finally paid off big time.

Just who does he think has benefited from large numbers of the white underclass believing this is how liberals think about them for most of the past fifty years? And why does a smart guy like him figure that pattern won't continue?

Poor white people will make common cause with poor Black People and poor Latinos before such liberals give up their preening conceit.

Update 2: I've pointed out who voted for Trump, white people in our age group whose median income is about $72,000 a year. Higher in income and older and whiter than those who voted for Hillary Clinton. If you want to blame anyone for electing Trump, Simps, it's more likely to be people who were grooving with you in college than not.

Yesterday. while discussing the need for Barack Obama to issue a general pardon to Hillary Clinton, not because she committed any crime but because the fascists of the Republican Party are talking about continuing the quarter of a century inquisition they've already subjected her to - without being able to identify a single crime to indict her on - I said, "there is, literally, nothing the Republicans would not do with the support of the American media to distract people from the horrors they are obviously intent on unleashing." That becomes clearer every day, hour by hour as the catastrophe that the Trump presidency will be unfolds in all its incompetent, vindictive, mendacious and larcenous immensity. CBS, The New York Times, National Public Radio, the Washington Post, even parts of MSNBC, that home of the liberal ghetto hours when they figure those will have the least impact on our politics, all of them are normalizing and habituating the American People to the fascist regime that is taking shape. I also noted yesterday that the channeled ghost of Jimmy Stewart is in on the act by asserting that the very document that was so useful to the fascists in establishing control, The United States Constitution, is magically going to save us like the rewrite of one of his scripts when no one can think of a realistic denoument slathering the tension with the requisite cinematic gush and good feelings and third-rate Aaron Copland knock off music saving the day. We have gone from watching our media, both entertainment and what is alleged to be news create Donald Trump, promote their creation and enable his election by giving him free air time worth billions of dollars and to also join in on his attacks against his opponent, Hillary Clinton, endlessly repeating every lie ever told about her, including many which the media made up. Yet we are still supposed to pretend that our media is going to save us? The trouble with liberals and, even more so, the secular would-be left, is that we're far from being as smart as we love to believe we are, we are far from being realists. Like that Hollywood practice of making things all better with cinematic magic, we, too, believe in magic, the magic of "more speech" and, most stupidly of all, the American press and electronic media are going to rescue us when they have been in on the con from the start. You really can't trust people who think the "congress shall make no law" press provision of the First Amendment is entirely more important than the ability of free people to choose their own government. And almost to a person, that defines the American journalists' view of things. I am trying and failing to think of a journalist who I've heard or read talking, in depth, about how their profession came to the place where they have enshrined their ability to lie to and con the American People out of democracy as a civic virtue. And into this comes the promotion of the phenomenon of Paul Horner who seems to be crediting himself with getting Donald Trump elected with all of the "satyrical" phony news stories he hoaxed alleged and allegedly real news sources and politicians and Donald Trump into believing were real. And, this election cycle being what it is, I'd say he just might be right about that. This source gives a list of the lies that Horner invented and inserted into the cyber brain-damage that passes as our media. I know I've heard Trump and Republicans and alleged news outlets and everyone down to internet trolls spreading a number of them, even the most obvious lies. Perhaps the most recent was that someone was paid $3,500 to protest against Trump's selection. Is the story about him accurate, is his role in putting what will certainly be the worst, most obviously unqualified. and likely most dangerous into office? Hell, how should I know? Apparently the media that has fallen for his hoaxes over and over again never bothers to check them before they pass them on. And if they don't do that, they will as their proliferation of rumors that someone like Trump repeats. Hell, in the media we've got, how can we know Paul Horner is real? Maybe he's a front or an invented persona, invented by the Putin regime to cover its lie machine, invented by the Republican National Committee, invented by Macedonian teenagers to make money by screwing the world. If it's the last, I hope they like living under Russian occupation, something their parents could probably tell them a bit about. If Paul Horner is real, his "satire" should be a crime because its results have been horrific. One of the stories I read about him said he was against Trump in real life, if that's true he's not only a total idiot, he's a total asshole. I don't have much hope that democracy has any chance against this kind of stuff if it is allowed to continue. If the American People choose to allow the fun and games and lies that put Trump into the presidency to continue because of some vague notion about the virtue of the media being free to do what it has maybe they not only can't keep democracy, maybe they don't deserve it. They've been turned into stupid children by the media and the con men who pushed that line of First Amendment interpretation. As I am typing this, Steve Inskeep is on NPR with Anthony Scaramucci, papering over Trump's complete hypocrisy in campaigning against Wall Street and now filling his transition and, no doubt his regime with the dirtiest of the oligarchs of Wall Street. Now they're trying to soft-sell Jared Kushner to be a nepotism hire by Trump. NPR must be the cheapest brothel of Washington press whores.

Here are a few resources that would have made a couple of classes I took in college a bit easier. Here's a place you can download PDF files of a rare edition of the complete Liber Usualis in modern notation. You can download it but if you print it out on two-sides, on my printer it came out with the pages being upside down from the one on the other side. Also, the explanatory text is in Latin. You might want to also download this file of Masses and Vespers and or this file of the Liber Usualis with the explanations in English, though the music is printed in the "Gregorian Notation". That notation is, in some ways, helpful but in other ways not especially helpful. You will need to learn now to read the numes and the ligatures, which are explained in the introductory text. I would point out that there are a lot of pages to print out so you might want to be selective as to which pages you choose to print. I only printed out the sections with the ordinary chants of the mass and the office. I might choose to print out some individual pages of the rest of it as desired but I'm not planning on ever going through the whole liturgy, which isn't used by more than the most reactionary of "traditionalists". Of course such "traditionalists" are generally ignorant of the history of the Catholic liturgy or they'd know that there is no period in the past or today which represents their romantic notion of that"tradition". The famous Solesmes style of singing the chant is valid for its period, it is, though, a relatively modern invention. There is no real, original authentic way of singing them, that idea is also ahistorical romance, though the melodies of many of the chants are very ancient and have been part of the tradition of Western Music from about the beginning of it being documented. If you want to look at the methods of chanting the psalms with the psalm tones, the instructions to do that are in the beginning of the section of the Ordinary Chants of the Office, right after the Ordinary Chants of the Mass. If you want to read about the chant, Willi Apel's book on Gregorian Chant will tell you about everything you're likely to want to know. If you want something shorter the article in the Harvard Dictionary of Music or Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians are very good, especially in the most recent editions.

Charles Pierce is in the running to be the Venerable Bede of our time. Here is his mild mannered disgust with Tom Hanks trying to normalize and soft sell the disaster we are about to encounter.

"We are going to be all right," Hanks said. "America has been in worse places than we are at right now." He then went on to explain those places, which he witnessed firsthand. "In my own lifetime, our streets were in chaos, our generations were fighting each other tooth and nail, and every dinner table ended up being as close to a fistfight as our families would allow. We have been in a place where we looked at our leaders and wondered what the hell were they thinking of. We've had moments with administrations and politicians and leaders and senators and governors where we asked ourselves, "Are they lying to us? Or do they really believe in this?" That's all right…We do have the greatest country in the world. We may move at a slow pace, but we do have the greatest country in the world, because we are always moving toward a more perfect Union.

... That journey never ceases. It never stops. Sometimes, like in a Bruce Springsteen song, one step forward, two steps back. But we still, aggregately, move forward. We, who are a week into wondering what the hell just happened, will continue to move forward. We have to choose to do so. But we will move forward, because if we do not move forward, what is to be said about us?

Jesus Mary, that song is about the dissolution of Springsteen's first marriage.

As if Sleepless in Seattle, his falsification of history in Charlie Wilson, as if dozens of pieces of Hollywood corn sweetener crap weren't enough.....

It's always a mistake to expect anything of a Hollywood actor in the way of high intelligence or deep thought. I've know stage actors and they are generally a lot smarter. I wish he'd just shut up and stick to making lousy movies.

Update 2: Oh, yeah, and if you think my crack about Hollywood actors often being total meat heads was mean:

So why is Hanks so confident that, like Sully and his airplane, America will be safe (even if there’s a bit of, er, malfunctioning)?The Constitution of the United States.“That document is going to protect us, over and over again, whether or not our neighbors preserve and protect and defend it themselves,” Hanks said.And he knows — he even referenced this Schoolhouse Rock song about it:
I should have warned you that you might consume more than a safe monthly dose of bromides if you read that. I suggest that the real role for Tom Hanks would be George F. Babbitt, he's clearly been preparing to play him all his adult life.

Ihave gone from thinking the idea was stupid to being in favor of Barack Obama issuing a blanket pardon to Hillary Clinton if she wants one. In his issuing of it he should be clear that he is not implying that she broke any laws but that he is doing so in light of the quarter of a century of the endless investigations that the fascists of the Republican Party have used in an attempt to destroy her and how they show no signs of stopping that now that there is no reasonable expectation that she will ever again run for the Presidency that she, in fact, did win but has been denied by the anti-democratic features embedded like congenital syphilis in the United States Constitution. The Republican Party is a complete and utterly undeniable fascist party now, even a presidential pardon won't keep them from smashing any of the constitutional traditions that always depended on people of honor to stay in place. If I were Hillary Clinton, I would expect that within what remains of my lifetime, I would be arrested. They would illegally arrest her and subject her to a show trial, I would expect that because there is, literally, nothing the Republicans would not do with the support of the American media to distract people from the horrors they are obviously intent on unleashing. If you doubt that, read what was published by Steve Bannon at Breitbart, the implementation of which, I am certain, as recently as two weeks ago our media would have dismissed as an impossibility. Now that Trump is installing him as his primary adviser, anyone on NPR or CBS or CNN or FOX who is trying to white wash that filth is the equivalent of Axis Sally. Only probably not a single American soldier ever believed Axis Sally, the TV and current media trained American population has tens of millions who believe or profess to believe lies as obvious as the ones she told.I am prepared to set the defection of Mike Lofgren as the official date of when the last decent Republican left. Here is how his 2011 piece at Truthout startsBarbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944)Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.I will note that some on that list of people who should be too insanely fascistic to be in a democratic government are watered down sewage to what is coming in with the Trump regime. I would recommend that you read what he said in that piece, considering his criticism of Democrats seriously because they were a part of the problem. I think Hillary Clinton might have been the last chance to save American democracy from what the Republicans have been building for the past fifty years, I would say that Lofgren might have noticed that before he did but that's all in the past. I strongly suspect that Hillary Clinton, fully aware of the necessity of walking a narrow way over the corruption that the Supreme Court created, using all of the weaknesses that are part of the Constitution and the Court's own traditional superimpositions on it, the empowerment of the oligarchs and the billionaire sociopaths, I believe she was engaged in a gaming of that corruption to try to get the presidency to start to dismantle that corruption. I believe that the Republican-fascists, the corporate media and the billionaires suspected that was her motive, why she stuck to trying when any other politician would have given up long ago. I think if she could take what her winning the popular vote should mean, the presidency, she would have appointed Supreme Court justices who would end corporate person hood, who would overturn Citzens United and Buckley vs. Valeo and other court rulings made by courts, Republican fascist such as under Roberts and Rehnquist to foolishly and allegedly liberal, such as under Warren, which have fatally damaged American democracy. Our failure to amend the fatally flawed Constitution when it installed previous losers of elections has resulted in this disaster. If you think that is over the top, I am afraid you are going to find out in the next few years it is probably a moderate estimate of what a disaster is about to befall us. If not under Trump then in whatever horrors a party and government under the advice of Steve Bannons will produce.

No one has asked yet but I've been using the numbering of the Protestant version of the Bible because it's more often followed by composers if they designate a number to their settings. You might notice that quite often the Catholic numbering is slightly different, not because anything's been left out but because when they were beginning to number chapters and verses (itself a late medieval invention) some longer Psalms were divided differently resulting in different numbering. I have been using the Contemporary English Version as a standard text because some of the atheists who troll this place probably couldn't deal with a less colloquial translation. They don't tend to be careful readers. I looked at the Easy To Read version but I'm not sure I entirely trust it, though its origins in coming up with a version that could be read by people whose primary language is American Sign Language is intriguing. Some of the texts I looked at seem to deemphasize the radical economic justice content that is right at the heart of the scriptures and in one place seems to delete it, though it mentions it in a footnote. I might be wrong about that but I don't have limitless time to check them. But the CEV makes it unnecessary. I believe the Contemporary English Version is accepted by most mainstream churches, including Catholics. I like reading the older versions but I prefer something that uses modern language. I just downloaded but haven't read much of the century-old Jewish Publication Society translation, maybe I should give it precedence. Or maybe I should just bite the bullet and learn to read Hebrew. I'm getting lazy in my old age. For anyone who wants to chant the Psalms or other texts, which allows them to have a greater impact, I'm not big on using the Gregorian method of doing that with an English text though some people do that. Here is one way that is proposed for chanting the Psalms with an English text. It's certainly usable but I'd think you should come up with your own way of doing it, no need to stick with the Gregorian modes or even to organize it in the same way if it's for your personal use. If you're doing it to enhance your own understanding and deepen that, maybe coming up with your own way is the best way to chant them. As long as you keep the meaning in mind and serving that, your mistakes will probably help you as much as what you do right. Anything that forces you to think.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Since this setting is pure Vatican choir repertoire, I have no idea what the Orthodox priests are all about.

51 Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your lovingkindness;according to the abundance of Your compassion, blot out my transgressions.2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.3 For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.4 Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Your sight,so that You are justified when You speak, and You are blameless when You judge.5 I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.6 You desire truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part You make me to know wisdom.7 Purify me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.8 Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones that You have broken may rejoice.9 Hide Your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.10 Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.11 Do not cast me away from Your presence, and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me.12 Restore to me the joy of Your salvation, and uphold me with Your willing spirit.13 Then I will teach transgressors Your ways, and sinners will return to You.14 Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God, God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of Your righteousness.15 O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare Your praise.16 For You do not desire sacrifice, or I would give it; You do not delight in burnt offering.17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.18 Do good to Zion in Your good pleasure; build the walls of Jerusalem.19 Then You will be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with burnt offering and whole burnt offering; then they will offer young bulls on Your altar.
I couldn't find a setting in English that I liked so I posted the famous one from the Vulgate by Allegri.

These days the Psalms of lament and regret and anger seem to be the most appropriate. How can we sing a joyful song when we are facing down a catastrophe brought on by our own acts?

You have to wonder just how far from its best self the United States has wandered when one of the nation's leading war criminals is nervous about the incoming administration. From Foreign Policy:"He thinks all kinds of crazy things about prosecutions," said John Yoo, a Berkeley law professor who, while serving at DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 and 2003, helped write legal justifications for aggressive interrogation methods that critics call torture. Those memos have since been rescinded. "I don't think he has a very good sense of how our law enforcement system works," Yoo told Foreign Policy.The proponent for theoretical prepubescent ball crushing thinks El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago is an ignoramus and a threat to the rule of law. Let that roll around in your head for a while. Get up from the floor only when you feel it's safe for you to stand. For myself, every day that I wake up and discover that the name of some notorious atrocity serial killer hasn't been floated for Surgeon General, I feel temporarily relieved. Then, I open the other eye.

I have been trying to leave a comment at that Neal Gabler piece I posted about at Moyers and Co. since comments were reopened but they have been rejected by the moderator. Here's my comment I tried to post this morning.

We live in The Age of Lies, in which the truth went from being reality to it being relative to it being optional and now it's seen as irrelevant. And that is largely due to the electronic media and the string of legal decisions starting with the Sullivan Decision that made it impossible for politicians to sue the media when it lied about them. The permission given in that most clueless of decisions by a liberal court was taken by the corporate media which already dominated the collective attention span of the United States to propagandize them for their own benefit. That permission grew and was more skilfully exploited by the oligarchs which have arisen to lie about, almost exclusively liberal politicians and potential politicians so they would lose elections. The fifty three years of the regime of freedom of the lie which the courts and the legal theories of highly placed lawyers working for the media has seen the fatal wounding of democracy. Now we see it might have actually killed it off. And when I turn on NPR or I see CBS I see they are normalizing what Trump's thugs are doing in tearing apart egalitarian democracy and a decent society.The media, freed to lie by that interpretation of the First Amendment is what got us here. There won't be any restoration of democracy until the reality that the electronic mass media isn't like 18th century print media is accepted as a hard and mandatory reality that democracy either adapts to or it will die by a media which will like in service of oligarchy. Our legal system refuses to take that reality into account, the media certainly doesn't want it to. The Free Press, freed to lie will destroy democracy, not serve it. That would seem to be about as close to a law of nature on this issue as you're going to find.You will excuse me if I'm far less worried about journalists who work for the media which has gotten us here than I am the people who are the victims of what they produced.
Here are some of the comments which have made it through moderation at Moyers and co.

HelpSaveMaryland • an hour agoWhat utter leftist BS. The GOP defeated Dems at the national, state and local levels across the country. Now that is true diversity. Time to get America back on track. Trump 2016!TNO David • 15 hours ago"It all started when Wallmart .... and when Sam Walton died ..."In all your vast research, did you come upon the fact that HRC sat on Wallmart's board for years? Hmmm...Wonder if she was on the board when Sam died? Any bets? Anybody, anybody? The answer is YES! She was on the board when they made that horrible decision. Guess what? It was HER IDEA!Wanna know how she described it? "I moved the board forward during my tenure." I guess moving forward means ruining it. Typical Clinton Style.Pull your head out.http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05... • Reply•Share ›−Avatarlotusgdess TNO • 7 hours ago

Hillary joined the Walmart board so she could have some input into issues such as promotions for women and other worker issues. So stop distorting the truth like the right wing always does. You people think like Joseph Goebbels. Just keep telling the Big Lie enough and the masses will believe it. Well the masses are asses.Seedee Vee David • 2 days agoIt's not anger that made 60 million people vote against a war mongering Harpy. It was self preservation.2 • Reply•Share ›−AvatarSam Seedee Vee • a day agohe LOST the popular vote, never forget that. The majority of humans in the US who voted voted for Clinton, voted AGAINST hatred, and all the things he stands for.5 • Reply•Share ›−AvatarSeedee Vee Sam • a day agoDig out, Buddy. The winner - by a vast amount - was None Of The Above.What percentage of eligible voters voted for Hillary?Nowhere near 50%, was it?Who is going to live in the White House in 2017? • Reply•Share ›−AvatarDavid Seedee Vee • 21 hours agoAre you brain dead Seedee Vee or whoever you are. Clinton WON the majority of the vote nearly a million votes. Here again the facts being twisted to suit your own agenda,telling lies like Trump. When is it going to stop, it won't stop until people start putting people like you in your place that are literally just sitting there lying through your teeth.And stgp using clang, it only shows your lower IQ and intelligence and education.What are you a 14 or 15 years been brain washed by your brain dead parents.

BleedsBlue365 • 21 hours agoHe won't last. ISIS will take him out sooner rather than later, if we are lucky.Seedee Vee David • 21 hours agoI can't show you all of the dead bodies because I am neither a funeral home director, a war crimes investigator nor your mommy proving to you that there are no monsters under your bed.The Clintons are monsters and the World is very lucky to not have them and their sycophants in power for at least the next 4 years.At least until Chelsea buys her seat in Congress.Phil W • 5 hours agoSo we should have voted with the communist billionaire, Soros, and voted for an extremely corrupt Hillary? You nominated a horrible candidate. It's the DNC's fault they lost.I have to say, I'm not entirely surprised that my heresy against the fundamentalism of the free speech industry is considered beyond the pale while that kind of stuff is within it.

I am known for not very often dropping f-bombs but holy shit, we are about to be governed by the mother of all clusterfucks in the history of the United States. Kindly Doc Maddow pointed out on her show Monday night that, so far, the president-elect and/or his staff have not yet returned calls from the Departments of State and Defense, as well as calls from the CIA and the NSA. This must make people in those minor federal agencies a little verklempt. Stories are leaking that the president had to point out to the president-elect that the job of being president is harder than it looks. And the president-elect wants to give some of his children, the ones who will be running his blind trust, which is neither, top-security clearance because there's nothing that can possibly go wrong with that. And that was just the last two days....My internal organs began to liquefy on Sunday night when, under not-entirely-hostile questions from 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl, the president-elect clearly didn't know how the Supreme Court works, nor did he know how its decisions operate on the country at large."They'll be pro-life, they'll be — in terms of the whole gun situation, we know the Second Amendment and everybody's talking about the Second Amendment and they're trying to dice it up and change it, they're going to be very pro-Second Amendment. But having to do with abortion if it ever were overturned, it would go back to the states. So it would go back to the states and —""Yeah, but then some women won't be able to get an abortion?" Stahl asked."No, it'll go back to the states," Trump replied.And if some states ban it?"Yeah, well, they'll perhaps have to go — they'll have to go to another state," Trump said.OK, I don't agree. But it's not an unfamiliar position. But then they talked about marriage equality and I ended up pretty much being thrown from the vehicle."Well, I guess the issue for them is marriage equality. Do you support marriage equality?" she asked. "It — it's irrelevant because it was already settled. It's law. It was settled in the Supreme Court. I mean it's done," Trump said. "So even if you appoint a judge that — " Stahl prodded. "It's done. It — you have — these cases have gone to the Supreme Court," Trump said. "They've been settled. And, I'm fine with that."Every president learns on the job. Even presidents who start out as vice-presidents learn on the job. There are vice presidents who have the job dropped on their heads who have to learn on the job, and they get up to speed in a couple of hours. The president-elect doesn't seem to have any clue at all what he's in for, and there doesn't seem to be anyone smart or well-versed enough in either his family or his entourage to sit him down and attach the training wheels except the guy he's replacing.Donald Trump litereally doesn't have the first idea of what he's just been chosen by the fucking electoral college, against the wishes of a majority of voters. to do and if he doesn't produce a total catastrophe it will be by mere chance. And lots of the people he's appointing to run things for him are hell bent on producing one by intention. I don't think there is anyone in the world who doesn't have some investment in pretending the American Constitution is the wisest of all possible documents who doesn't see that it has produced a horrifying and decadent horror of the kind that, if people survive it, will be written about like the fall of the Roman Republic, the rise of the Third Reich and other epic disasters in history. And our media, NPR, CBS, CNN.... are pretending everything's cool. I wish Barack Obama would finally, finally exercise some responsibility and warn everyone that things are about to blow. This is certainly going to be worse than the financial meltdown of 2008 in every way.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

130 OUT of the deep have I called unto thee, O LORD; Lord, hear my voice.O let thine ears consider well the voice of my complaint.If thou, LORD, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss, O Lord, who may abide it?For there is mercy with thee; therefore shalt thou be feared.I look for the LORD; my soul doth wait for him; in his word is my trust.My soul fleeth unto the Lord before the morning watch; I say, before the morning watch.O Israel, trust in the LORD; for with the LORD there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption.And he shall redeem Israel from all his sins.

Book of Common Prayer

130 From a sea of troubles I call out to you, Lord.2 Won’t you please listen as I beg for mercy?3 If you kept record of our sins, no one could last long.4 But you forgive us, and so we will worship you.5 With all my heart, I am waiting, Lord, for you! I trust your promises.6 I wait for you more eagerly than a soldier on guard duty waits for the dawn.Yes, I wait more eagerly than a soldier on guard duty waits for the dawn.7 Israel, trust the Lord! He is always merciful, and he has the power to save you.8 Israel, the Lord will save you from all of your sins.

Oh, good heavens. Donald Trump has done the impossible, he's made me agree with something proposed by Nicholas Sarkozy. Responding to questions about Trump pulling out of the Paris Climate deal, here's what he said:"Well, I will demand that Europe put in place a carbon tax at its border, a tax of 1-3 per cent, for all products coming from the United States, if the United States doesn’t apply environmental rules that we are imposing on our companies,” Go for it, Europe. Pass that before Trump gets into office.

I didn't hear anyone else call it The Age of Lies, that's what I called it. It is the Age of Lies, lies define the non-reality that rules, that everyone pretends is real even as they don't care that it's not true. That is why we have the massive liar Trump and the massive liars who created him and who support him. Lies define the world that could bring us to this. Lies will likely be the thing that we use to destroy ourselves.

Watching the Trump gang assemble the crime family that is going to be called the executive branch for the next four years reminds me of nothing so much as the one and only honest scene in Frank Capra's movie, State of the Union, the one in which the various columnists and labor racketeers and others get together to talk about how they're going to dupe the United States into gaming their candidate to take over the country. Only that was make believe, Donald Trump isn't Spencer Tracy and Melania Trump isn't Katherine Hepburn and the cartoon figures representing the worst filth that our system operates under are all too real in reality.

I think the make believe of Hollywood has been a huge disservice to democracy, there is not going to be a daddy Spencer - a Republican daddy, if I recall just to show how fictitious the movie was - who is forced by the hurt glance of mommy Hepburn to repent his wrong doing and dramatically save the country at the last minute. The identification of the danger was as much as they got right, the solution to it was sheer Hollywood ham.

The kind of thinking that looks for a savior with star power and charisma is what go us into this mess. That's what got us Barack Obama, those HOPE posters from his first campaign are some of the most bitterly ironic political ephemera in our history.

I favor Howard Dean going back to being the head of the Democratic National Committee. Congressman Keith Ellison is probably a good person, he's certainly smart enough for the job, but it isn't the kind of job that should be part-time. We know Dean can do it. He did it before only to be shoved aside by the Obama people who squandered what Dean had such a big hand in putting together, going from Democrats having control of none of the branches of government to having control of the executive and the legislative branches.

Hillary Clinton has my deepest respect and gratitude for her years of dedicated service to the country and to the Democratic Party but this election put a final end to her hopes of becoming president. In my musing I wish she would do what John Quincy Adams did and go either back to the Senate or the Congress. Edward Kennedy was never as good a politician as he was after he gave up the idea of being president, I suspect Hillary Clinton could outdo him in that respect. But I also wouldn't blame her if she left it all behind, most would have long ago, considering what she has had to endure. I strongly suspect that people will still be regarding her with admiration when the last four or five presidents and the one we're about to get are considered as comprising an especially decadent period in our politics. She will be the possibility, the enormous potential rejected in the Age of Lies.

Now it's time to look at what worked, what not only didn't work but was a disaster . Debbie Wasserman Schultz as the head of the DNC definitely qualifies as that. If there is any indication that a sitting politician should not have the job, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is exhibit A in that argument. And we should listen the people who produced success and ignore those who opposed it.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are the past, Hillary Clinton is the future we can't have, it's time for all of them to step aside. I'm not even interested in defending Bill and Barack, anymore. With his idiotic visit to Loretta Lynch, I'm so disgusted with Bill Clinton that it would suit me if I never heard his name again.

I will say that having Chuck Schumer as the Democratic leader in the Senate does not give me a good feeling. He, like so many from New York City, is too chummy with the major sources of corruption, I doubt he would be enthusiastic for building the Democratic Party in Ohio or Michigan, he has a record of favoring the financial interests that are the embodiment of corruption. I doubt he will prove me wrong on that. Bernie Sanders has also endorsed Congressman Ellison. As I recall there is bad blood between him and Howard Dean, I would take that possibility into account when thinking about his endorsement. I think Bernie Sanders is most useful as a gadfly, not as a great strategist. I hope he gives the Trump fascists as much trouble as he can manage to make but I still want Howard Dean as head of the Democratic National Committee.

On Comments

This is a blog for adults and I intend to keep it that way.

I've been forced to go back to moderating comments since some people abused the privilege. Adulthood confers privileges that childishness shouldn't. Please be patient, barring accidents, any comment that should be posted will be.

ABOUT MUSIC VIDEOS

I post music videos to inspire you to support living, working musicians, to buy their recordings so they can continue with their music and to buy the recordings of artists who have passed so their music will be preserved and available into the future.

About Me

I am a gay man, a religious man, an equality absolutist, a democrat, and a primitive socialist who believes that the means of production are by right in the ownership of those who produce wealth. I am an environmentalist of the extreme kind who is convinced that the way things are going now will lead to the extinction of people, of many other species of life for the benefit of a pathologically greedy elite who must be stopped and leveled with the rest of us. If that's not radical enough, I believe that reality is real and that most of what gets called liberalism and leftism in the United States is an impotent fraud based in fashion and the conceit of a bunch of elitists who delight in despising people they consider beneath them. Thus the political impotence of that style of pseudo-liberalism which is merely a liberalish-libertarianism. My heroes include Shirley Chisholm, Martin Luther King jr. the liberation theologians, and a few politicians, Senator Whitehouse and Sanders, many of the members of the Congressional progressive and black caucuses and other politicians who actually struggle to change laws and make real lives really better.

On Being Disreputable

After seven years of being told that what I've said is beyond the bounds of ... something, they're hardly ever specific, and that I'm just awful, I've decided to go with that.